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Freudrsquo;s “On Narcissism”: A Teaching Text
CLIFFORD YORKE
Anyone coming to Freudrsquo;s paper “On Narcissism” for the first time may find the going rough. For one thing, there is the sheer profusion of ideas, so densely packed as to make heavy demands on the reader. And the subject matter itself is not easy; there are many conceptual problems in the issues under discussion. It is difficult to be a student these days without realizing that a great deal of controversy surrounds the concepts of “narcissism,” “the self,” and “self-esteem.” These subjects bristle with complexities. This fact in itself may be a very good reason for going back to the first psychoanalytic attempts to grapple with some of them. It will probably come as no surprise to learn from Stracheyrsquo;s introduction that Freud found the paper difficult to write and that he said in a letter to Abraham: “The lsquo;Narcissismrsquo; had a difficult labor and bears all the marks of a corresponding deformation .”
For all that, it is easy to feel very involved in Freudrsquo;s explorations. As always with his developing ideas, it is helpful to relate any particular formu- lation to those that have gone before and to keep an eye on those that lie ahead. In reading the paper on narcissism, for example, you may find it useful to keep in mind that it already has the makings of a tripartite model of the mind, even if there is still a long way to go before the formulations of The Ego and the Id, which clarified so many problems and set up a major landmark. Here, for example, we are already dealing with an important development in the theory of the instinctual drives, with the “ego,” and with an internal self-observing agency that anticipates a more fully developed concept of the superego; and we are concerned with the relations of these agencies both to one another and to the outside world.
In the Standard Edition, as is well known, Strachey almost invariably translates the term das fch as “the ego,” and he himself traces, on more than one occasion, the shift in the meaning Freud attached to it in the course of developing his ideas. The detailed history of these shifts is rather compli- cated, but Stracheyrsquo;s brief discussion of it in his Editorrsquo;s Note is perfectly serviceable. In the early papers, the “ego,” though often ill-defined, usually stands for the “self” (a term not without its own complexities), whereas from 1923 onward it has a more definite if restricted meaning, refemng to a mental agency with its own attributes and functions. In this sense, it can perhaps be thought of as the executive apparatus of the mind, holding the balance among the often conflicting demands of the instinctual drives, the superego, and external reality. As Strachey observes, in the paper on narcis- sism the concept of the ego “occupies a transitional point.” In practice this means that one has to be particularly careful about the meaning of the term whenever it is met in the course of the argument. I shall try to clarify this as I go along. But “the ego” is not the only term that may trouble the reader in this paper; many difficulties are encountered with the concepts of pri- mary and secondary narcissism, and I will also give some attention to such questions
Let us now take a look at some of the principal ideas in the paper, bearing these points in mind as we do so. In trying to tackle the problem of narcis- sism Freud discusses both the normative and the pathological. He talks about “His Majesty the Baby” and about falling in love. From the side of pathology, he draws inferences from schizophrenia and paranoia, from phys- ical pain in organic states as well as in hypochondriasis, and he starts and ends his discussion with reference to sexual deviation
Freud begins by reminding us that the term “narcissism” was initially a descriptive one, first used by Nacke at the turn of the century to refer to the attitudes of certain people to their own body, which they treat in much the same way as other people treat the bodies of those with whom they have a sexual relationship-that is, they look at it, admire it, stroke it, fondle it, and find it entirely self-satisfying. Carried to this degree, narcissism has all the characteristics of a sexual deviation. Freud takes the view that the phenomenon does not exist in this extreme or pure form. He may be right: certainly, if it does exist, it might not come to notice. It would be unlikely to offend the public or attract the attention of the police, and since people do not “suffer” from disorders such as this, they would be unlikely to seek help on account of it. But it is certainly met with in less extreme forms. As Freud points out, it is an important component in homosexuality. And it may very well be met, in some degree, in the course of an analysis. A patient I know once described the phenomenon in talking about her adolescence. She recalled looking at herself in the mirror and admiring her body, but to become really aroused she would wear diapers soaked in very warm water as she gazed at her reflection. Perhaps this particular example comes to mind because the regressive element in the experience is so striking, perhaps because of its bearing on childhood narcissism. These adolescent episodes did not persist a$ a deviation into the adult life of this patient. They did, however, involve a flight from object relations and to that extent are of further pertinence to our immediate concerns.
But the example also illustrates Freudrsquo;s long-standing view, so well argued in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, that what appears as deviation in later life is to be found in normative child development. Certainly, the pleasure derived by the infant from the warmth of the urine and feces in her diapers is unlikely to be thought of as perverse. This is in line with Freudrsquo;s conclusion that narcissism is not a deviation as such but the sexual “complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preserv
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